The Crazy Idea
Almost all of us come up with impulsive and crazy ideas but most of us do not see them through because they are time-consuming, but Ben Ahles was not one of us! He spent 10 long months carefully glueing 42,000 matches into a giant sphere, only to let it burn in an oddly satisfying video!
The Organized Project
He didn't just wake up one morning and started to glue the matchsticks together. He analyzed the whole thing beforehand. He actually used modelling software to see how many matches he would need and what the final sphere would actually look like. The resulting model was so data-heavy that it crashed his computer while rendering it.
Next, he began the glueing process. He describes it as "this process is to articulate my mental and emotional state while glueing matches together for hours upon hours,
The Final Step
He kept on pursuing it with perseverance until the sphere came into its final shape. “I kept going! And it kept growing! And it started to look less like a sphere and more like a child’s approximation of a sphere. I had to let go of the idea of perfection when I saw that I hadn’t been able to maintain a perfect growth just by eyeballing the placing of the matches. I guess I could have templated the curvature and really tried to nail it but I was so far past the point of caring that I just wanted to get it done. ", he said.
He captured the burning sphere from four angles and the result is oddly satisfying, to say the least. Watch out the video!
